


The Dork-Vengers

by orphan_account



Series: The Dork-Vengers [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Domestic Avengers, Gen, Multi, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-17
Updated: 2015-05-29
Packaged: 2018-03-31 01:22:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 5,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3959113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All the after-credits scenes that could have been.<br/>Basically, this series will be a collection of one-shots about daily life with the Avengers - what happens when they're not out fighting crime. Think of it as Earth's Mightiest Sitcom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Most Important Meal of the Day

**Author's Note:**

> I super appreciate all the attention this story has been getting. Comments are more than welcome! I'd really love to hear what you guys think.

Everyone figured there would be issues when they first moved into Stark Tower together. They were right, of course. Most of them saw the issues coming. Tony and Bruce kept blowing things up at ungodly hours, Steve hogged the TV attempting to catch up on pop culture, and Natasha hid unauthorized weapons all over the tower, "just in case." These were all predictable events that each of the other Avengers learned to live with. They were just part of life at the Tower.  
But the one problem nobody saw coming was that of breakfast.

By all appearances, Tony Stark seemed like the kind of guy who would be a late sleeper. The kind of guy who finally drags himself out of bed an hour after you're ready to go and won't even speak until he's had his coffee. Maybe because his hair and his "I don't care" attitude usually had a fresh out of bed vibe about them.

Regardless of the state of his hair, Stark was actually the earliest bird on the whole team, and dark was the day that he wasn't awake by 6 a.m. That was probably due to some mixture of anxiety, nightmares, and weirdly single-minded dedication to science, but of course Tony would never admit that. Either way, he did need some way to pass the time in the mornings before the rest of the team woke up, so he took to making breakfast, making sure it was warm (or cool, depending on what he was making, as nobody wants a warm yogurt parfait) and ready for whoever happened to wake up next.

And therein was the problem that nobody saw coming.

Stark Tower was equipped with the world's greatest technology. Even the toaster oven was smarter than your average home computer. There shouldn't have been any way to screw up the breakfast.

There was.

Tony Stark turned out to be the worst cook any of the Avengers had ever met. He could simultaneously burn and undercook a piece of toast. His omelettes were known for being more shell than egg. And god forbid somebody let Tony Stark near a waffle iron. But despite all that, he refused to accept his absolute failure in the kitchen and kept making breakfast.  
Most of the team had no trouble being blunt about Tony's lack of cooking skills (Thor actually spat out his portion the first time he tried Tony's attempt at french toast), and JARVIS often tried to intercede before Tony could step foot in the kitchen, but nothing deterred him. It got to the point where each Avenger had to make a decision: suffer through a Tony Stark breakfast each morning, or starve until lunch?

Bruce and Steve were the only ones who didn't choose to starve.

Eventually, Clint called a meeting of all of the Avengers - except Tony, of course. Something had to be done before they all got food poisoning.

 

Now, the Avengers have a rotating sleep schedule. Tony has resigned himself to the fact that someone will always be up before him in the mornings, always munching some delicious-looking breakfast food, which is always, always ordered in from the place down the street.


	2. Well, That's Pun-Fortunate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Goddammit, Thor.

Natasha Romanov was going absolutely crazy.

She was just trying to have a nice, normal training session and shoot some nice, normal targets and eat her nice, normal snack. But then Thor came in and everything went to Hell in a handbasket - which it had been doing, lately, whenever Thor walked into a room.

Tony Stark was thanking his lucky stars that Thor finally left to go bother somebody else.

He had spent the whole morning trying to fix a minor propulsion issue with one of his suits - a job that should have taken him an hour or two, tops. But then Thor came in and everything went to Hell in a handbasket - which it had been doing, lately, whenever Thor walked into a room.

Bruce Banner hadn't had his day interrupted by Thor yet. However, he had been interrupted by victims of the God of Thunder.

He had planned to spend the day reading - after all, there weren't many days when Bruce felt like he could spend some time relaxing. Since one of those days had finally showed up, he wanted to take full advantage of it. At least, before Steve and Natasha ran in, muttering overlapping and urgent statements about hiding and getting away and "if I hear Thor speak one more time today..."

It's funny. Normally Thor was one of the Avengers who could be trusted to leave well enough alone. Sure, he was loud and confused by human culture - but then, who of the Avengers wasn't?

But not today. Not since somebody (the team didn't know who it was, but each and every one of them would have paid dearly to find out) had taught Thor about Midgardian puns.

There were the classics, of course. 

"Captain, my good friend! Did you know I once knew somebody who had the entire left side of his body cut off? Indeed, he's all right now!"

"Can you not?" was Steve's reply, but Thor kept right on going. It seemed as though he told Steve every pun in the book - but he didn't know the half of it.

Thor started refining his approach. 

"Tony, I would like to make a chemistry pun, but I know you won't react. And besides, all the good ones argon."

"I don't even do chemistry, usually," Tony grumbled, doing his level best to focus on not shocking himself with a live wire.

"Ah, how about antigravity? I read a book on the subject. 'Twas impossible to put down!"

Tony shocked himself.

The whole team ended up in the room of a rather disgruntled Bruce - with two notable exceptions. Of course, Thor was missing, probably looking for somebody else to tell his newfound puns to. But Clint was nowhere to be found, either.

"Poor guy probably got assaulted," Nat pointed out. "Somebody should go save him from death by puns, and no, I'm not volunteering."

As Steve crept out of Bruce's room, chosen against his will to lead the Save Clint initiative, he saw two figures talking at the end of the hall.

"And you told Tony all the science ones?" asked a voice that sounded suspiciously like Clint's.

"I have. I quite enjoy these jokes," replied a voice that sounded suspiciously like Thor's.

"Great, because there are more of them. I've got an entire list of puns about bicycles right here, do these next..."

Steve crept back into Bruce's room.

 

Clint wasn't allowed back in the tower for three days.


	3. Cherry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Avengers are falling apart in the coolest way possible.

Thor and Natasha were on the verge of a fistfight.

There would always be those speeches about how "nothing will tear the Avengers apart" and how "this team is so important to the safety of the world" and how "we gotta stick together - it's the only way we'll get anything done."

Normally, of course, even the least cooperative of the team followed these edicts (usually issued by Steve), because why wouldn't they? The Avengers were friends, and the world relied on them staying that way. And besides, they were usually pretty good at stopping infighting before it started.

Usually.

Steve walked into the kitchen, glanced at Thor and Natasha, who were squaring off in front of the freezer, and groaned.

"There's only one, isn't there?" he asked. Nat and Thor both nodded, not even looking at Steve. 

"Why do we always let this happen?" But nobody answered Steve. He sighed once before walking purposefully over to the both of them.

"Hey, Nat," he said. "Temporary alliance? I'll fight you for it once we take out this guy."

"Deal," she hissed back.

Clint was drawn to the kitchen by the sound of a scuffle, as well as multiple things being knocked over and Steve yelling something along the lines of "but you got it last time," followed by Thor yelling something along the lines of "no, I did not." He figured this was his chance. So Clint tiptoed slowly into the kitchen, watching Steve, Nat, and Thor out of the corner of his eye. He was almost to the freezer. Just a few more steps...

"Are you guys fighting again?" Bruce leaned through the doorway. Everyone glanced up at once. Clint cursed under his breath.

"Obviously," Nat pointed out. "Will you be joining us?"

"No, thank you," Bruce said. "I'm tempted, but I got the last one last time. And besides, I've got stuff to do. Have fun, though."

"We will," Nat said.

"Hey, is nobody gonna point out that Clint's trying to sneak it while we're fighting?" Steve asked.

Clint cursed again before turning to face his friends-turned-opponents.

Tony glanced up from his phone at the sounds of loud cursing. He had been ignoring his friends pretty successfully up until that point, but really, enough was enough.

"Sir," JARVIS's voice said, "would you like me to order another few boxes?"

"Sure, J," Tony replied. "But don't tell them. I wanna go rub it in first."

"Are you certain that's a good idea, sir?"

Tony grinned. "Positive."

The kitchen was an absolute war zone. A bowl of fruit was overturned on the floor. Steve (turns out everyone had ganged up on him instead) was also overturned on the floor. Everyone was just a tad out of breath and more than a tad beat up.

"Sorry to interrupt," Tony said, smug grin still stretched across his face, "but can I sneak by you guys? I wanted to grab a popsicle for myself. Are there any orange ones left?"

"Basically all the orange ones are left," Nat said flatly.

"Yeah, nobody likes them but you," Clint added. 

Tony shrugged one of his shoulders as he reached into the freezer and carefully selected a popsicle. He unwrapped it, stuck the whole thing in his mouth, and threw away the wrapper before anybody could say a word. Then, he furrowed his eyebrows, obviously pretending to be confused.

"Huh," Tony said around the popsicle. "Guess I grabbed the wrong flavor. Looks like we're all out of cherry now."

And before the rest of the team could process that sentence, Tony ran for his life.

 

You'd think something interesting would tear apart the Avengers from the inside. Like mind control, or conflicting ideals about how the world should be, or deep emotional trauma. Or basically anything besides all liking the same popsicle flavor.


	4. The Island of Misfit Socks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we learn that the Avengers buy each other's merch, and nobody is surprised.

"Guys, has anybody seen my Captain America socks?" Tony yelled.

"One, I'm standing right here. Two, I'm not a guy. And three, why do you own those?"

Tony glanced over his shoulder to see Natasha leaning against the doorframe. "Great," he said, "you can help me look. Can't find them anywhere and I need them before we leave for this mission thingy. They're lucky."

Natasha rolled her eyes. "Still doesn't explain why you own them, but I'll tell everybody." She turned around. "Guys, be on the lookout for Tony's Captain America socks, which he owns for some reason!"

"I literally just yelled at them," Tony grumbled.

Steve put down his shield with a grimace. Couldn't this have waited? They had to leave in like half an hour. But, never one to refuse a friend in need, Steve took up the search for the lucky Captain America socks.

Clint, who was putting on his own socks at the time, rummaged around in his dresser drawer. "Not here!" he yelled to nobody in particular. Tony's voice came distantly back after a moment.

"Keep looking!"

One by one, the Avengers grudgingly stopped whatever they were doing in order to look for Tony's inexplicable socks. Bruce scoured the whole lab, turning a few projects upside-down in the process, before it occurred to him that nobody, not even Tony, manages to leave both of their socks in a laboratory.

Thor and Clint, who had been frequent co-conspirators ever since the pun fiasco, decided it would be a good idea to check through the laundry that had just gotten done. The two picked through four laundry baskets (you go through a lot of loads of laundry when there's a full team of superheroes living in your tower), but to no avail.

"Should we put all this back?" Clint mused, looking at the large, now unfolded pile of laundry on the floor.

Thor shrugged. They left, closing the door behind them.

Fifteen minutes 'til departure time, and multiple floors of the Tower had been reduced to a state of complete disorganization. Most things were on the floor, and some things that were supposed to be on the floor were propped on tables or slung over the back of couches. Everybody was surprisingly dedicated to the search - probably they just wanted to get it over with, though some of them probably also liked the feeling of turning Stark Tower upside-down.

"Found 'em!" Tony yelled at the top of his lungs, with seven minutes until the team had to leave.

"Where were they?" Natasha called, several rooms over.

"Back of the dresser drawer!"

The simultaneous groan let out by the entire team was loud enough that people on the street looked up at the open windows of the Tower, befuddled.

Everybody finished getting ready. Three minutes until departure. 

Steve cursed under his breath (and braced himself for the inevitable "language" comment, but none came). 

 

"Hey, guys?" he yelled tentatively - if a yell could be called tentative - into the many rooms of the Tower. "Has anybody come across my Iron Man socks?"

Steve supposed he deserved the string of curses that came back at him from various directions.


	5. Pew Pew Pew

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> pewpewpewpewpewpewpewpewpewpew

Everybody unanimously agreed that the phrase "team-building exercise" should never be in the same sentence as "The Avengers." Unless, of course, the sentence was "The Avengers should never, ever, ever have to do a team-building exercise."

But Clint and Natasha got on board awfully fast, once they heard it would involve speed, skill, and accuracy.

Everybody else was still skeptical. Who decided that the best way to get a bunch of fighters like them to bond was over laser tag?

Actually, they all knew Nick had decided that one, because if they had to do a goddamn team-building exercise to appease the Bureaucrats That Be, at the very least it could involve loud music and shooting things.

The team got dropped off at the laser tag place all at once, as though they were a birthday party of nine-year-olds. Which was funny, because as soon as they stepped through the doors (highlighter green, peeling paint), they ran into an actual birthday party of nine-year-olds.

"Whoa, cool!" said one of the girls, not bothering to lower her voice beyond a shout. "It's the superheroes!"

"They're called the Avengers, dummy," replied one of the boys through a mouthful of cake.

"Well why are they here?" piped up a scrawny kid in too-big jeans.

The Avengers all exchanged glances. They were slowly but surely getting used to excessive media attention (well, Tony and Steve had always been used to it, but still). But a bunch of children, talking about them like they weren't even there? That was both new and kind of unexpected.

Thor glanced down when he felt someone tugging on his pants leg. It was the kid with the oversized jeans. "Hey, mister, why are you guys here?"

"We have come to build our team," Thor replied.

"Yeah, but are you gonna play laser tag?"

"Indeed we are."

The kid ran back over to the rest of the party, evidently satisfied with the information. "Guys!" the kid said. "They're gonna play laser tag! We should play against them!"

"Um, they'll totally beat us," pointed out a girl in big glasses.

"Nah, we can take 'em!" shouted one of the boys.

The Avengers exchanged a different kind of glance. Maybe playing laser tag against these kids would be fun. And imagine the looks on their faces when the Avengers let them win, and they could tell everybody at school that they beat Earth's Mightiest Heroes at laser tag.

Tony made the decision for everybody. "Let's play. You guys versus us."

The whole birthday party erupted into cheers. But as they quieted down, the girl in the glasses spoke up again. "The teams aren't fair," she said. "You guys are all grown-ups. And superheroes."

"So I'll play on your team," Natasha replied calmly. All the Avengers looked at her in surprise.

"What?" she asked. But nobody said anything else. 

Everybody got vests and guns, and a rather starstruck employee led them into the playing room. They could hear thrumming techno music through the closed doors (bright orange this time, though the paint was still peeling).

Kids and Avengers were turned loose inside the laser tag arena. They got right to work - at least, the kids and Nat did. 

Thor couldn't quite get the hang of how the gun worked, so most of what he shot was the floor or the walls. Bruce panicked a little and kept shooting his own teammates. Steve was excellent at using the obstacles to his advantage, but Bruce kept shooting him by accident. Tony went out many, many times in multiple blazes of glory - in other words, he basically just charged the other team and shot stuff willy-nilly.

And poor, poor Clint was accurate beyond belief, but he was used to his bow and arrows and his teammates kept getting in the way, and on top of that there was Natasha.

She was fierce, laser tag-wise, and teamed up with half a dozen kids who were eager to prove that they could beat actual, honest-to-god superheroes. Every time one of the Avengers got a clear shot at one of the kids, Natasha appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and took them out without even looking.

The Avengers, minus Nat, lost - forty-six hits to five. Afterwards, they couldn't really say whether they felt closer as a team. But they did make some pint-sized friends and take home some leftover birthday cake. 

 

So when, a few weeks later, Nick handed down the order that more team-building was to take place, not a single one of them protested.


	6. Cleanup On Aisle Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And this is why they let JARVIS do all the shopping.

Cabin fever was setting in for the Avengers in a major way. For months on end, it seemed like evil never slept, and the team didn't see each other too often since they were all dealing with their own troubles. They were pleased when they all got some free time and could hang out in the Tower together.

They were perplexed, though, when that free time stretched on as winter turned into spring. Nobody was getting bombed, kidnapped, experimented upon, mind-controlled, or invaded by aliens. In fact, the only notable event that had happened in the past week was the cold, angry rain that the sky spat out for days on end - the kind of rain that said "don't come outside or you'll regret it."

Over sixty floors and nothing to do.

Clint flopped over on the couch, making a vague sort of groaning noise. Steve, who was propped against the arm of a big cozy chair and staring at the TV, returned the groan. After a moment's pause, there was a distant, muffled groan that sounded like it was coming from the lab - that had to be Bruce and Tony. Then, of course, there was the roar of frustration and outrage. Thor, obviously.

Natasha stood in front of the open fridge and groaned, unwittingly finishing out the world's worst chorus.

"Why is there no good food here?" she asked the empty kitchen.

"I can order whatever you would like, Miss Romanov," JARVIS responded.

There is a look people get in cartoons and movies with awful graphics, when their eyes open wide and a lightbulb appears with a "pop" sound effect over their head.

Nat had that precise look on her face.

"You know, I don't think that'll be necessary," she said, already walking toward the doorway. 

Natasha leaned out into the hallway and yelled at the top of her lungs, "Get up, boys! We're going grocery shopping."

"We have an intercom system," Tony grumbled, in the lab. "Why does nobody ever use it?"

The sky was still spitting when the Avengers arrived at the nearest grocery store. Aside from a few cashiers and the occasional soccer-mom type, they were alone in the store. Perhaps the weather had kept everyone else at home. Bruce had a list tucked safely into his pocket. Of course, he didn't really expect anybody to care what was on the list, but he liked having it all the same.

Clint grabbed a cart, put one foot up on it, and pushed off with the other. "Hey, Tony," he said, appealing to the Actual Five-Year-Old side of Tony Stark. "I'll race you to the dairy products."

Tony yanked a cart of his own from the line by the door. "Oh, you're on, bird brain."

"Ouch!" Clint called back over his shoulder, already cart-surfing down the bread aisle.

The game evolved as they crisscrossed the store searching for all of their favorite foods. At first it was just a simple "race you to the x," but soon Natasha and Clint were riding in their own individual carts and smack-talking each other while Steve and Thor pushed them. After that, it morphed again into a cart-surfing scavenger hunt to find every item on Bruce's list. Bruce actually won that one, partially because he was fast but mostly because he had the list.

When Steve's cart overturned, knocking over a large pyramid of oranges, the Avengers were asked to please put back the carts, pay for what items they had, and exit the premises. The whole team was laughing too hard to look properly chastened.

They put back the carts, paid, and left with seven bags of groceries.

 

When they got outside, the sun was shining.


	7. The Flu Crew

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nick Fury? More like Sick Fury, am I right?
> 
> ...That was really bad. I'm sorry.

Nick Fury was fielding phone calls left and right. He swore if he heard one more of his superheroes' voices on the phone, he was going to start cussing somebody out. There were big things happening, and he needed his whole team out worrying about it - the sooner, the better.

The phone rang, and against his better judgement, he picked it up.

"Hey, it's me," Clint said. "Listen, I know we've got stuff to do, but either Thor and Steve can do it or it can wait until tomorrow, cuz-" He dissolved into a coughing fit then. 

Nick hung up the phone.

It was easy to forget, sometimes, that the Avengers were human too - though some in rather looser senses of the word. With all of their crime-fighting and powers and skills, it was so easy to forget that they could be taken down by something smaller than a full-scale invasion from an alternate dimension.

But the flu was going around, and suddenly most of the Avengers seemed very, very human.

They were all sprawled out on any available surface in the TV room, the one that took up most of the forty-second floor. One of the James Bond movies was playing, but it was hard to hear over the fits of coughing that broke out every few seconds. Thor was pacing around, on the phone with Jane, trying to figure out exactly how to take care of people when they have the flu. Steve was lying on the floor with a laptop in front of him, frantically googling the past decade's worth of flu remedies.

Bruce sniffled. "Y'know," he mused, "the Other Guy can't get sick."

"Oh no," Tony said. "No Hulking out in the Tower. Especially not when-" Tony didn't finish his sentence due to the coughing fit.

Natasha groaned. She was somehow taking up the entire couch, with her arms and legs positioned in such a way that she sort of looked like an abandoned marionette. But apparently it was comfortable.

"Can one of you just get us some meds or something?" she asked, addressing Steve and Thor.

"I would," Steve said, getting irritable at this point, "but antibiotics aren't gonna help the flu."

"And how on Earth does the resident Capsicle know that?" Clint asked.

Steve glanced away, sheepish. "Google," he said, finally. 

Thor finally finished his minute-long goodbye with Jane and triumphantly pressed 'end call.'

"Chicken soup!" he said to everybody assembled. "According to Jane, that helps."

"I'm sorry, but the best your brilliant science girlfriend could come up with was chicken soup?" Natasha said.

Thor didn't respond. He just pulled Steve up from the ground and pulled him along to the kitchen, because he wanted to make chicken soup for his sick friends.

Nobody really wanted to argue - or do anything at all, really. Bruce turned up the volume on James Bond. Natasha coughed. Bruce turned up the volume again.

"Y'know," Steve said to Thor as he put a pot of water on to boil, "this whole thing is weird for a couple of reasons."

"Yes?"

"Well one, I'm still not used to being one of the only healthy ones in a roomful of sick people. It used to be the other way around."

"I understand," Thor said. "I am simply not used to sickness."

Steve nodded. "Uh-huh. And two, I have absolutely no idea how to use any of this stuff." He gestured to Tony's tech-filled kitchen, with all its clean lines and its suspicious lack of visible buttons.

"I have no idea either," Thor admitted.

After quite a bit of deliberation and almost setting several things on fire, Thor and Steve rejoined the rest of their team, each bearing a couple of bowls of halfway decent chicken soup. The sick Avengers ate without complaint, and by the time James Bond ended, they all reported to feel just a little bit better.

"Maybe we should call Fury and let him know we'll all be back on the clock tomorrow," Tony suggested.

 

Nick's phone rang across the room. One of the many intern types moved to pick it up.

"Is it from Stark Tower?" Nick asked, glaring at the intern type. He nodded.

Nick shook his head. "Let it ring," he said.


	8. Hold Some, Fold Some

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Place your bets on who owns the bright yellow bra, because it's not Natasha.

"Are you sure you don't want Dummy to do it?" Tony asked, exasperated.

"Pardon me if I don't trust a robot you call Dummy," Natasha snapped back. "Look, this'll go a whole lot quicker if we all cooperate."

"Who are you and what did you do with Nat?" Clint asked.

The Avengers were traipsing down to the laundry room, because none of them actually wanted to fold the laundry, so of course that meant they all had to fold the laundry. It might have been smarter for them to wash their clothes in small loads and fold as they came out. But they didn't. The Avengers let everything - uniforms, t-shirts, pajamas with each other's faces on them - pile up until it became the world's largest, most nightmarish pile of laundry.

And then somebody had to fold it.

Normally Bruce, or sometimes Steve, got stuck with the job, but today they had put their collective foot down, so everybody got dragged into the job too. Not a single one of them was happy about it.

In the laundry room, Thor yanked open the dryer door. A huge, multicolored ball of assorted shirts, pants, socks, undergarments, and other unidentifiable clothes came tumbling out. A collective sigh went up among the team. Thor started tossing clothes from the ball at whomever would catch them, and they set to work. Meanwhile, Thor was transferring an equally large clothing ball from the washer to the dryer.

It was going to be a long afternoon.

At first, they worked in comparative silence, with only the occasional grumble or grunt of dissatisfaction. At least, until Clint found the Iron Man underwear.

He held them up between his thumb and pointer finger and gave them a Look, the kind that said "why the frick do you exist?"

"Tony, these yours?" Clint asked. Tony glanced at the fabric dangling from Clint's hand and burst out laughing.

"Surprisingly, no," he said. "I buy a lot of my own stuff, yeah, but I didn't even know they were making those."

It took a second to sink in, but suddenly everybody was giving each other long, suspicious looks.

"Are they yours?"

"No. Yours?"

"Hell no. Yours?"

Nobody would own up to the underwear, so Clint folded them - gingerly - and set them aside for whomever wanted to claim them.

The team was a bit more talkative after that, mostly accusing one another of owning the underwear. Bruce and Tony got into a fight about the correct way to fold a pair of pants.

"No," Bruce said, obviously exasperated. "You fold them in half along the butt, then you double them over."

"And then double them over again," Tony said, snatching the jeans from Bruce and folding them his way.

"They're going to get weird creases in them," Bruce said, trying to grab them back.

"But you can store them more efficiently this way!"

Natasha grabbed the jeans out of Tony's hands. "Could you guys not turn into an old married couple over my jeans? Yeah, thanks."

But the next really big uproar didn't come until the next load of laundry came out of the dryer.

Nat held up a plain pink t-shirt. Or rather, she tried to. She only got about half of it off the ground.

"Whose giant-ass t-shirt is this?" she asked. "Thor?" She tossed it at him. Thor caught it, but also took some fabric to the face.

"This does not belong to me," he said. "Too large." He tossed it to Bruce.

"Other Guy doesn't wear shirts," Bruce said. He tossed it to Steve.

"If it's too big on Thor, ya really think it's gonna fit me?" Steve asked. He tossed it to Clint.

"Nope," Clint said, and tossed it to Tony. Tony shook his head.

"Put it with the underwear," he said.

By the time the laundry was finished (four full loads), the Iron Man underwear, the giant pink t-shirt, seven single socks, an electric yellow bra that Natasha said she never saw in her life, and an extraordinarily threadbare Mathletes sweatshirt remained unclaimed. Everybody swore up and down that they didn't own any of the offending items of clothing.

 

Two weeks later, walking by a room with an unfortunately open door, Natasha discovered who the Iron Man underwear belonged to.

It was Steve.


End file.
